Vitola: Rothschild- 4.375” x 50 ring gauge
- Received as part of 2020 SnS Member Kit
Background
In case you’ve just joined us, this is part 4 of a 5-part series looking briefly at the Saints & Sinners Membership Kit cigars from the 2020 kit. If you’re wondering how to buy these cigars…you can’t…which is one reason I’m just doing “brief” looks at them. No point in making people ultra-jealous. In case you are wondering just what “Saints & Sinners” is…about a decade ago, Pete Johnson decided to create a “fan club” of sorts for the Tatuaje Cigars brand…and the brands closely associated with it, L’atelier and Surrogates. The initial membership was limited to a specific number of people, but every year, members in good standing get to invite one new person to be a member. If that person doesn’t pay up their membership dues by a specific date, they don’t get to become a member that year…and the person who invited them is unable to use that invitation for a different person. I say this in order to emphasize…if you want to be a member and a friend uses his invitation on you, DON”T ignore or forget about it. Someone did that to me one year…he didn’t get my invite the next year and he won’t get it this year (assuming there is a 2021 membership drive).
2020 Cigar #4 is a Rothschild or Short Robusto format, with a small little stubby pigtail on the cap. Since these are made in the My Father factory in Nicaragua and blended by some combination of Pete Johnson, Don Pepin, and Jaime Garcia, it’s a fairly safe bet they consist of Nicaraguan filler and binder leaves. The wrapper is a dark milk chocolate brown and doesn’t have quite the rough and toothy look of the Broadleaf, so I am guessing it’s some kind of Habano leaf, either Oscuro or Maduro, and probably Ecuadorian in origin.
Notes
The wrapper had a very earthy aroma…which is to say it really smelled like dirt…the soil the leaf was grown in, I expect. There was a slightly sweet aroma coming from it, as well, and the cold draw had a mix of cocoa powder, espresso bean, dark chocolate, cedar, and earth.
I had just bought a bottle of Knob Creek Bourbon the day before I fired this up, so I thought it would be nice to crack open the bottle and have some with the cigar.
I fired up the cigar and found it to be fairly full-bodied right from the start, with a strong cocoa powder note overlaying plenty of earth and coffee bean notes. There may have been some sweetness in the mix somewhere, but I wasn’t picking it up yet…although there was plenty of black pepper on the tongue and red pepper on the nose.
The Knob Creek was 100 proof, so I automatically added some water to it, although in retrospect it probably isn’t really necessary on a whiskey that aged as long as Knob is. As it stands, the watered-down, lowered-proof Knob was extremely smooth with caramel and vanilla notes standing out and virtually no spice or alcohol vapor burn on the back end.
If I had to guess, I would say this cigar is a Fausto…or at least something closely related to it. It was as full-bodied as anything I can remember in the Tatuaje catalog and that lines up with the Fausto. Plenty of earth and cocoa powder and espresso bean the whole way, along with a touch of sweetness, although that could have been the influence of the Bourbon along the way. I do wish I hadn’t added water to the Bourbon. It was good, but could have been better at full strength.
